Paradise

Moshi Moshi; 2011

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Slow Club's first album, Yeah So, was a twee, hyper-romantic delight, full of charming little indie folk songs ideally suited to mix tapes and teen television soundtracks. The Sheffield, England duo could have kept going in that direction indefinitely with potentially great commercial rewards, but instead they've opted to make a second album, Paradise, which dials down their perky sweetness and emphasizes rhythm and atmosphere with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter.

This isn't to say that Slow Club have become unrecognizable. One of the most impressive things about Paradise is the way the band have retained so much of their character while shifting their tone considerably. A few of the songs here-- the rollicking "Where I'm Waking" and the wistful "Hackney Marsh"-- would have made sense on Yeah So, but for the most part, the melodic and lyrical sensibility of that record has been filtered through a different set of influences. There is still a sweetness to their sound, but it's balanced out with a range of more difficult emotions and a darker tonal palette.

The most drastic difference between Yeah So and Paradise is that Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor have largely abandoned close harmonies. Instead, Taylor has asserted herself as the dominant vocalist, with her voice taking the lead on nearly every track, while Watson provides complementary harmonies or focuses on his guitar. This was a brilliant decision on their part. Watson has a pleasant tenor, but Taylor's voice is much more colorful and expressive. Though she supplied the high points of previous singles "Trophy Room" and "Giving Up on Love", her vocal performances through Paradise are a revelation: Her phrasing is consistently thoughtful and surprising, full of subtle cues that invest her straightforward lyrics with remarkable depth much in the same way a great actress can draw rich character detail out of a threadbare script.

Taylor's best performances-- and not coincidentally, Paradise's two best songs-- take her voice in very different directions. The ballad "You, Earth, or Ash" is so stark and delicate that her voice often seems naked, barely accompanied by the minimal plucking of Watson's guitar. She sounds wounded and fragile, but her tone is very adult and dignified; she gracefully transitions from moments of self-assured beauty to sounding as though she could spontaneously break down into tears. She is more girlish on "Two Cousins", the set's percussion-heavy opener, leaning hard on her upper register and reaching up further still to underscore particularly anguished lines. The song, about a pair of estranged family members, cycles through two choruses-- the first one carried by a trebly, diagonal synthesizer part and the second more focused on her voice, which rings out with heart-breaking clarity as she sings the tune's gutting conclusion: "I look into your eyes/ You don't know who I am."

In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine. Led along by Taylor's confident voice, the duo has evolved from being among the best of an indie pop field overcrowded with cutesy duos to carving out a distinct niche for itself that opens up further opportunities for creative growth.